


Edge of Seventeen

by Windybird



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Coming of Age, Families of Choice, Gen, Group dynamics, Hero Worship, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Multi, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Harm, Touch-Starved, Young Inquisitor (Dragon Age), teenage angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-19
Updated: 2018-11-19
Packaged: 2019-08-25 21:40:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16668802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Windybird/pseuds/Windybird
Summary: For a growing teenage boy, Cassandra thought, he should’ve been much sturdier. As it was, his olive skin stretched over his bones rather unhealthily. His height might have made up for his lack of meat, but looking at him- at the way his soft brown hair curled at the temple, at the way his eyes shifted back and forth underneath his eyelids- made something protective, almost maternal awaken inside of her. “He is the Herald of Andraste, Adan. You must address him as such.”In which the Inquisitor is younger than everyone expected, and not everyone knows quite what to do about it.





	Edge of Seventeen

“Is he sleeping?”

“Fitfully. Cassandra, I’m not the boy’s keeper. One of the others should do it.”

“We can’t afford to put any of our resources to waste, Adan. Surely you understand that.”

“I don’t,” Adan grumbled, rubbing his face in his hands. “Do you know how many hours of sleep I’ve gone without, watching over this- this-“

“Herald,” Cassandra said steadfastly. As if hearing her, the boy murmured something unintelligible in his sleep and turned on his side. They both stared at him. For a growing teenage boy, Cassandra thought, he should’ve been much sturdier. As it was, his olive skin stretched over his bones rather unhealthily. His height might have made up for his lack of meat, but looking at him- at the way his soft brown hair curled at the temple, at the way his eyes shifted back and forth underneath his eyelids- made something protective, almost maternal awaken inside of her. “He is the Herald of Andraste, Adan. You must address him as such.”

“I will do no such thing,” Adan said, affronted. “He’s barely more than a child.”

The boy mumbled something under his breath once more before rolling back onto his side, back turned to them as his subconscious escorted him far away from the little cot he was laying in.

“Watch over him for just a bit longer, Adan,” Cassandra said, a frown tugging down the corners of her lips as she stared at the boy’s back. “He needs to overcome this. Solas is still watching him, yes? What does he make of him?”

“Nothing magical about him, save for the nasty mark on his hand,” Adan shrugged. Cassandra felt a flicker of irritation run through him. He could afford to be ambivalent about this in a way she couldn’t be, in a way that would mean potential ruin for both her and the Herald as time marched forward. “But Solas never does share much with me, regardless.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Cassandra said dryly. “I’ll be back soon, alright? Try not to let him perish in your care.”

“The Chantry will certainly be more grateful to me than you are if I do so,” Adan muttered. Cassandra rolled her eyes and walked out of the alchemist’s little cottage. He stared after her for a few seconds, before turning around and saying, “You can stop pretending to be asleep now.”

The boy stilled, before his lean muscles shifted underneath the blankets and he propped himself up on his elbows. His eyes, when opened, was the color of solid ichor, brownish gold and bright with anger as he looked up at Adan.

“I’m not a child,” he snapped, his voice low and deep as if to punctuate his words. “So don’t refer to me as such.”

“You’re a child if I say you’re a child,” Adan corrected him. “And just because you have a mark on your hand does not mean you’re more destined to fulfill the work of Andraste herself, any more than Flissa is.”

“Can this Flissa seal rifts? Can she wield a sword and fight off terrors with one arm tied behind her back?” The boy asked challengingly. In much of the same fashion as Cassandra, Adan rolled his eyes and took a seat on the edge of the cot.

“She works in the tavern, boy. She sees more terrors than you do on a daily basis.” The boy had no response to this. Feeling emboldened, Adan asked, “How old are you, anyway? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

“Seventeen, thank you very much,” the boy snapped. Adan sighed. In his lifetime, he’d dealt with more moody teenagers than he’d ever cared to. He thought looking over his sister’s children would fulfill this quota of dealing with those under the age of twenty for at least the next ten years or so, but the Maker evidently had different plans in store for him.

“Why were you even at the Conclave in the first place?” Adan wondered aloud, staring at the boy. Despite the maturity of his voice and the measure of his height, his handsome face still retained a bit of childhood roundness within it, the last fleeting remnants of childhood he must’ve still retained after all that he’d seen and done. “Your parents couldn’t find an appropriate replacement for you?”

“I was sent to aid my family in the proceedings,” the boy protested as hotly as he could manage, given his weakening state. “The Trevelyan family is close with the Chantry and the Templar order. It was only reasonable that I should be sent after my seventeenth birthday, as all my brothers and sisters had gone after theirs.”

“Your parents must be regretting their decision, then,” Adan said carefully. The boy’s face shuttered, and he looked away, deliberately not responding to Adan’s observation. Adan sighed before patting the boy’s knee.

“What’s your name, son?” He asked. The boy’s head swiveled to look at him suspiciously. Really, he wasn’t bad-looking at all. If he just lost the hardness in his eyes and the firm downturn of his mouth, he could easily be considered striking by people with a much more discerning eye than Adan’s. As it was, his general countenance was one of attractive irascibility.

“Micah,” the boy said, after a long, pregnant pause. “My name is Micah.”

“Can’t say it’s nice to meet you, Micah, but it’s a damn sight more pleasant than watching your body cooling on my cot,” Adan groused. Micah looked up at him with some surprise, evidently unused to adults being anything less than either totally disinterested in him or much too deeply probing (Adan liked to believe he was a healthy mixture of both).

A flicker of a smile was playing on Micah’s lips as his eyes fluttered shut. Adan watched him fall back into the comforting caress of his unconscious mind, before he got off the cot with a sigh and set to work on another healing potion.

 

* * *

 

“You’re kidding me,” was the Iron Bull’s first reaction upon seeing the fabled ‘Herald of Andraste’ for the first time. What he was looking at was a child. Or, rather, a teenager, which was pretty much indistinguishable from ‘child.’ Barely a ring above the latter, in fact. He was probably still teething when Bull made his first kill.

The boy’s face turned stormy at his words. “I believe thanks are in order, Iron Bull.”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks,” Bull said casually. “Also, you’re a child. Andraste’s tits, you’re just letting him walk out here like he owns the place?”

He directed this last question towards a tall, bearded man standing near the boy. The man gave him an uncomfortable shrug, as though he, too, was uncomfortable with the fact that he was allowing a boy less than half his age to lead him into battle, but said nothing else in turn.

“What were you expecting?” The boy asked him, eyes stormy as he directed his gaze up to Bull’s face. Maker, Bull was literally more than three times his size and girth, and yet he was staring him down as confidently and as aggressively as a dragon staring down at its chosen prey. Despite himself, Bull couldn’t help but be a bit impressed by the self-assuredness in his every move and word, even if it _was_ most likely a farce to force others to see past the fact that he was just coming out of the end of puberty.

But even when he accepted the Iron Bull’s proposition as working for the Inquisition, Bull still couldn’t help but feel a bit weird about it all. As in, he was going to be taking orders from a boy who still had his virginity intact, and it _wasn’t_ a weird thing, given his age. When he asked the bearded man about it again later on- Blackwall, he learned afterwards-, he had leaned against a wall and said, “He may be young, but he’s the best damned fighter I’ve ever seen in all my years. So long as he keeps himself out of trouble and tries to do the right thing for his people, I’ll follow him most anywhere.”

“That’s some nice loyalty you got there, Blackwall,” Bull had said admiringly. “How long have you known the kid for, anyway?”

“About a week or so.” Blackwall cracked a small smile at the expression on the Iron Bull’s face. “He decapitated a man who was about to plunge his knife into my chest, before killing off three others in a matter of seconds. It was rather impressive, actually.”

As Iron Bull later learned, not many people knew the true age of the Herald of Andraste. Of course, not many people saw him up close and personal, as Bull and the others did, so he soon got accustomed to the looks of shock that would cross eventual companions’ faces when Micah showed up, as he inevitably did.

The best reaction, he’d decided, was that of Sera’s. She took one look at him before saying, “Are you friggin’ serious?” out loud, one foot resting on the cooling belly of a man she’d just killed a few seconds before. And even though Micah had heard it with most every companion he’d met along his way, he still groaned as Sera released a barrage of questions upon him.

“How old are you? No, scratch that, where are your _parents?_ Why’re they letting a kid lead an Inquisition? They holding you under duress, as some kind of figurehead or whatever? You need me to bash anyone’s brain in, let me know. I’m good with that.”

“Oh, I like her,” the Iron Bull grinned from the sidelines. Micah shot him a dirty glance, somehow managed to convince Sera that no, they were not holding him under duress, and that was that.

Personally, the Iron Bull tried not to think about it much, or what it meant when a group of able-bodied adults had to rely on a teenager with mild- okay, moderate- anger and abandonment issues with obvious family strifes to save them from mass destruction. It was only after the events of Therinfal Redoubt that he allowed himself a rare moment of introspection to think about it.

After their initial meeting, Micah began to look up to the Iron Bull (pun not intended). Sure, he ducked away from his casual touches and rolled his eyes at his wisecracks or his bawdy tales- and seriously, who said bawdy tales anymore? Bull was spending way too much time with Blackwall-, it was obvious that he admired the Iron Bull’s movements in battle, the way he could vanquish nearly any beast or demon with a mere swing of a sword or an axe. And as time went on, the Iron Bull realized that it wasn’t just him Micah was avoiding touch contact with. He didn’t- couldn’t- abide the touch of anyone, not even Cassandra, who the Iron Bull felt was slowly but surely taking on some sort of weird maternal/mentor/advisor role for the boy.

The Iron Bull didn’t even realize why until Micah exerted himself a little too much in one of their training sessions. He had pressured the boy into allowing him to look at the nasty cut that the Iron Bull had inflicted across his stomach, and it was only through a mixture of coercion, flattery, and threats that Micah finally pulled his shirt off.

There was the obvious gash across his stomach, of course, but even more concerning were the faded, silvery scars Micah sported across his wiry arms, his sinewy legs, the tops of his thighs and just below his collarbone. When the Iron Bull stilled, he knew that Micah knew the exact reason why he had paused so abruptly.

“It’s nothing,” Micah muttered embarrassedly, reaching to pull his shirt back on, but the Iron Bull’s hands encircled his wrists before he could even move. Micah glared at him and pulled against him roughly, but Bull refused to let go.

“Tell me how those happened,” he said in a quiet voice. In earnest, now, Micah tried to shake him off, but even he- defeater of a million demons in battle, vanquisher of giants and dragons alike, if you listened to Varric-, could not force the Iron Bull away.

“Let go of me,” Micah said, his voice tight and taut as an arrow pulled back against a bow.

“Not until you tell me what happened,” The Iron Bull responded, his voice light and airy in contrast with Micah’s little fire-and-brimstone air. Micah tried to kick him in the shin to displace him, but it was like a fly landing on the nose of a giant. It barely registered as a tingle. Now, if he’d moved his foot a little higher up, they’d have a problem, but the Iron Bull supposed Micah wasn’t used to kicking other men in their privates, thankfully enough.

“Why do you even _care?!”_ Micah demanded, looking more and more upset with each passing second spent imprisoned in the Iron Bull’s grip. His voice cracked at the last bit, making Bull smile in grim triumph.

“Because it’s you,” he said simply. “And because you’re my ally, and more importantly because you’re my friend.”

This time, it was Micah’s turn to still. His eyes, bright and coppery, examined Bull’s face for any display of cunning or mischief, and upon finding nothing, drew his gaze down to the floor and to his feet, uncharacteristically diffident. 

“My father,” he said by way of explanation, his voice no louder than a whisper. “I would… _displease_ him often, whether it was my temper, or my lack of concentration in my studies, or whatever he’d find fault with next. He would only do it for my own good. He would only do it so that I could improve upon my faults. So that I could become better than I was.”

The Iron Bull figured as much, but it was still difficult to hear. Micah rolled his shoulders back in discomfort at his lack of a response, before finally snapping, “Well? Aren’t you going to _say_ anything?”

“What could I say?” The Iron Bull asked, shrugging, and let go of his wrists as easily as anything, turning instead to a salve and dipping his fingers in it so that he could smear it across Micah’s wound. “You clearly have it figured out for yourself. Good for you.”

Micah watched him suspiciously. “So that’s it? No comforting words, no ‘it hurt me in the long one, he was an abuser’, no tired phrases such as that?”

The Iron Bull looked up at him in surprise, wiping his hands on his trousers. “Why would I? You said so yourself. He did it for your own good. So that you could improve upon your faults.”

Micah stared at him for a few beats, before slowly putting his shirt back on. He turned around and walked over to the door, before pausing, his hand hovering over the doorknob. The Iron Bull watched his shoulders begin to shake, carefully schooling his expression into something neutral as Micah slowly turned back around.

“He didn’t do it for my own good,” he muttered, so quietly Bull had to strain to hear what he was saying.

“What was that?” Bull asked innocently. Micah lifted his eyes to him, dark as embers underneath his eyelashes.

“He didn’t for my own good,” he repeated, a little louder this time. The Iron Bull frowned a little.

“But you said he did,” he said, in a reasonable voice. “You said he did it to correct you. And surely a- a _commendable_ man such as Bann Trevelyan wouldn’t hurt his child without wanting to help him, right?”

“He wasn’t commendable,” Micah whispered, his shoulders shaking even harder now. “He was a bastard.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that. Can you repeat y-“

“ _HE WAS A BASTARD!”_ Micah roared suddenly, his face scrunching up in pain. “He hurt me! _Every! Fucking! Day!_ Because he wanted to! Because he felt like it! Because I was the easiest target, I was the smallest, I was the- and my own mother didn’t even _say_ anything, she didn’t even-“

Bull watched as Micah’s eyes flooded with tears. Without moving a muscle, he watched them make their way down his face, silently, without a single noise, and then his breath hitched and something harsh and ugly wrangled itself out of his throat as he began to sob.

Quietly, as though approaching a frightened animal, Bull walked over to him and gently pulled him against his chest. Micah stiffened a little, but didn’t pull away. After a few seconds, he pressed himself a little closer to Bull and cried, his tears falling from his face and onto the flesh of Bull’s exposed stomach.

“It’s okay, kid,” Bull whispered, cradling the back of his head as though he was a small child. “Just let it out. It’ll be okay. Everything will be okay.”

“No, it won’t,” Micah gasped between sobs. “No, it won’t. It won’t.”

And there was nothing Bull could respond to that, save to hold him closer and silently pray to whatever Maker was up there that Micah was wrong.

**Author's Note:**

> askjfj this mostly stems from the fact that i know 100% that a younger inquisitor would get into even more trouble/drama than they do on a daily basis


End file.
